Fire (33 page)

“Andy — !” Barbara Harrison said in a scolding tone, “Don’t you speak that way to Mr. Munsen.”

In the bright-blue light that shone from the street lamps Luke could see people wandering around the graveyard, and in the street that ran beside it. Ordinary, healthy people, by the look of them. As the boy had said, they looked shaken and disheveled. And they were naked too, all but half a dozen of them.

The boy’s parents were standing beside them now too. “Has God spoken to you,” Robert Harrison asked, “or is He only acting through you?”

Luke flushed; the question embarrassed him. And it frightened him too, for reasons that he didn’t understand. “I — No. God isn’t talking to me. He really isn’t. And I don’t think that I’m His instrument, at least not any more than anyone else is.”

The man nodded gravely.

“Please,” Luke said, “don’t think this of me. I’m really no one special.”

“Aw, come on,” Andy said, and he shoved Luke’s elbow good-naturedly. “You show up Friday, half dead and needing a doctor, and inside of ten minutes you go and get yourself killed. Then you manage to get yourself resurrected by Sunday morning, and by Monday night half the dead people in New York are alive again. Now you’re trying to tell us that there’s nothing special about you?”

“I — I’m not God,” Luke said, “and I don’t want to pretend to be. Wouldn’t I know that sort of thing? And wouldn’t it be some horrible kind of a sin to lie about it if it wasn’t so?”

The boy shrugged. “Okay, then. You’re a saint. Saints don’t always know about it when they’re saints. In fact, I imagine that the best ones wouldn’t ever know. Being humble is part of being saintly. It only stands to reason.”

Luke shook his head; there weren’t any words left in his cannon. “I honestly don’t think you’re right.”

The sound of footsteps coming up the stairs.

“Oh,” Barbara Harrison said, “that’ll be the Johnsons. Or maybe it’s the Jenks family. They all wanted to meet you; they were supposed to drop by about now.”

Andy looked up at Luke; there was guilty mischief in his eye. “I think you may be having quite a bit of company tonight,” he said. “There were an awful lot of people who wanted to see you.”

Part of Luke was almost tempted to run and hide somewhere — the part of him that was afraid he was becoming some kind of an animal in a zoo. It was a silly fear, and he knew it. No one had him locked up. If he got up and left right now, running or not, no one would try to capture him. It wasn’t even likely that they’d follow him.

“It is the Jenkses,” Andy whispered up at him as a man, a woman, and three small children walked into the room. Two of them — the man and one of the young girls — held candles. “They’re okay.”

Mrs. Jenks looked at Luke suspectingly at first, as though she wondered if he was some evil creature who’d somehow deceived the Harrisons. That suspicion lasted only a moment; as she looked at Luke she seemed to see something that he couldn’t even see in himself. And she crossed the room, her whole family just a step behind her. “I’m Stella Jenks,” she said. “Is it true what Barbara says? Are you the one who brought the miracle?”

Luke felt a powerful urge to crawl under a rock and hide. “I don’t know,” he said. “I think — I think that maybe it touched me, anyway. I don’t remember very well, but they tell me that I died. And now I’m alive again.” Luke looked away. “The boy and his father know better than I do. They’re the ones who carried my corpse out to the cemetery.”

She was staring at him, trying to read him very carefully. “My child,” she said, “my little boy, here. Two weeks ago the doctor told me that he’s got a cancer, one of the cancers that they can’t do nothing about. Will you lay your hands on my boy and heal him for me?”

“Mrs. Jenks —”

“Stella.”

“Stella, I’m not a healer. Honest I’m not. I don’t know how to work miracles, even if a miracle did happen to me. If you want me to hold your child, I’ll hold him for you. But I wouldn’t know how to heal him any better than your doctor does. Hell — not even that well. At least your doctor can give him something for the pain.”

She frowned. “Maybe,” she said, “maybe some kinds of miracles are catching. Haven’t you looked outside? Haven’t you seen that cemetery?”

“I’ve seen it,” Luke said. He let out a long, hard sigh. “I’ve seen it. Okay, I’ll hold your boy. I don’t imagine I can hurt him, anyway.” He knelt down to look the boy in the eye. “What’s your name, huh, son?”

“Larry.”

He couldn’t have been more than four years old. And he was sick, sick bad — Luke could tell that just from the way the child’s skin hung so loosely over the bones of his face. From his eyes so yellow that even in the dim candlelight Luke could see the tinge. Seeing him hurt Luke so badly that the only thing to do was put his arms around the boy and hug him, and when he did Luke felt himself begin to cry. “You get better, you hear me, Larry? You get better.”

Felt the boy’s head nod against his shoulder.

Pulled back a moment, to look the boy in the eye again. “You promise me. Huh? I want you to promise me that you’ll get well.”

The boy nodded again; his expression was solemn. “I do. I will — I promise.” Larry wiped away a wet spot on his cheek where one of Luke’s tears had fallen.

“I’m counting on you,” Luke told the boy. And after that Luke needed to be alone for a while. So he got up, and went to the back of the apartment, and shut himself up in the bathroom in the absolute dark. And waited the time that it took for his gut to stop hurting.

When he came out again there were more people in the living room — more of them than Luke could count at a quick glance. Enough that there was trouble moving from one end of the room to the other. They all seemed to watch him, he thought — but not stare at him. They were more polite than that; they watched him from the corners of their eyes as they talked to one another.

He found Andy Harrison by the left window in the front of the apartment — pretty much exactly where he’d been the last time Luke had seen him. “Are there more like that?” Luke asked him. He spoke quietly as he could, afraid that someone else might hear him. “That little kid — he needed so bad. And his mother thought what he needed was me. Maybe the boy thought that too; I don’t know. But . . . God. I can’t cope with that, Andy. I can’t.” Andy was looking at him cold and hard, poker faced. Luke wanted to stop talking, wanted to shut up and go away, but the boy’s silence was so icy that Luke found himself throwing more words into the fire, trying to warm the air. “That little boy was dying, and he was coming to me for help, and there wasn’t a damn thing I could do for him, not a damn thing. If I have to go through that again . . . I don’t know. Alive or not, I think I’ll just curl up and die.”

Andy just stood there, staring angrily at the wall, not looking at Luke at all. After a while he shook his head. “You got a lot of nerve, you know that, Mr. Luke Munsen.” He was looking at Luke now, and growing angrier as he spoke. “Being a miracle is a responsibility. You say you’re not Jesus — okay, you’re not Jesus. You say you aren’t some kind of a saint, like my Momma thinks, then you’re not a saint, either. You’re still special — something awful special happened to you. Something miraculous. How can you be like that? If Larry Jenks and his mom think that maybe it’ll help him to see you, how can you begrudge them that? Are you so afraid of seeing the mean parts of the world that you won’t do what you can to make a difference? How can you be that low?”

“I — no. No.”

“No what? You want to try to tell me that it isn’t so?”

Luke started to raise his voice, caught himself, stopped before he’d said a word. The problem was that denying what the boy had said was exactly what he wanted to do. And . . . and much as he wanted to deny it, he knew that there was at least a measure of truth in the accusation.

A large measure of truth, most likely. But the boy was just a boy, damn it. What did a boy — maybe he was twelve, maybe he was thirteen — know about life? What business did he have lecturing Luke about responsibility?

What did it matter how old he was? He was right, and Luke knew it.

“Yeah. I guess that’s what I was going to do.” Sighed. “And I would have been wrong. Don’t beat me up about it, okay? Let me think. I need to think.”

Andy Harrison huffed. “Yeah — I know what you’re going to do. You’re going to sit around stewing in it until you can find yourself a bunch of good reasons for acting like a dog. You go ahead. I seen it before. I know about reasons: they don’t make anything right. They just make it easier to live with being wrong.”

“Yeah. Well.” Luke was looking out the window, watching the cemetery. It was quiet out there now, empty and deserted. The graveyard almost seemed to call out to him, as though it wanted him to rest inside its bosom. “Okay, then. What in the hell do you want me to do? Pretend I’m something that I’m not? Mumble silly words and tremble my hands over their heads? You think that’s any better?”

“No — but if they want you to care, if they want your attention, is that so much to ask?” He shook his head. “You owe that to them, if you ask me. God put you here for a reason.”

There was a grizzled, unwashed old man standing beside them now, listening. Watching — waiting for a pause in the conversation. Luke turned to him guiltily. A man who looked familiar somehow that Luke couldn’t quite identify.

“You cured that Jenks boy,” the man said. “Can you cure me too? I got no disease — not anything but getting old. I’m going to die soon. My bones say that; I can hear them. I bet you can hear them too, if you listen. Can you help me — please? I don’t want to die, Mister. Please don’t let me die.”

I didn’t cure that boy! Luke thought. He held his tongue. He glanced across the room, looking for Larry Jenks, to reassure himself —

And saw the boy playing tug of war with his oldest sister. Even from here Luke could see the change in him. His eyes were bright, pure white and healthy; his skin was smooth and clear the way a child’s skin should be. And for all that an hour before he’d looked too weak to carry his own weight now he was winning the contest with a girl who had to be at least twice his age.

Luke reached out and put his arms around the old man, and held him and held him. And loved him, and to hell with the fact that the man’s clothes felt oily, that he smelled like old shoes mislaid in a brewery.

And the man hugged him too, and he said, “Oh thank you Mister, thank you — God loves us all, he loves us, doesn’t he?”

And Luke smiled and patted the man’s back and he thought Yes, I think he does.

After that there were others, standing, waiting just outside arm’s reach. He took each of them in his arms as they came to him. Only a few of them seemed to have any disabling illness, but each of them seemed to have . . . something compelling in his eyes. A need, maybe. Or maybe it was only a desire.

They want me to love them. Luke couldn’t have said for the life of him where the thought had come from. But he knew it was so as soon as he heard it inside his skull, and he knew that Andy Harrison was right.

They drifted away and into their own conversations and lives when they’d got what they needed from him. When the last of them was gone, Luke looked up and saw the woman — the woman from the cemetery. She seemed less dazed now, and . . . there was something strong about her, as though . . . Luke wasn’t sure. She walked through the door and stood against the wall beside it, as quietly and unsettlingly in awe of him as every other person in the room. Not quite the same awe that all the others in the room were full of; somehow it was almost intimate and personal. She was dressed, now — in a wrinkled grey-cotton sun dress. She wore the dress well, in spite of the wrinkles; she managed, in fact, to make the dress look beautiful.

Luke looked the boy in the eye. “Did you tell her to come here too? Do you know her? How — ?”

The boy looked at the woman, then looked back up at Luke — looked at both of them hard and careful. “I haven’t ever seen her before. I can tell, though. There’s something . . . some kind of a connection between the two of you. Isn’t there? Something important.”

“I —” Luke felt himself growing afraid again, without understanding why. “I don’t know. I know her, yes, but . . . that isn’t what you mean, is it?”

The boy shook his head. “No, that isn’t what I mean. It’s like — look at her. Look at you. I didn’t have to tell her where to go to find you. Even if I knew her to tell her, it wouldn’t have made any difference. She’s going to know where you are, no matter where you go. Can’t you tell that, just seeing her?”

Luke looked at the woman long and careful as he could without staring at her, but hard as he tried he couldn’t see what the boy had. He saw something, all right, but whatever it was he saw wasn’t as sayable as that. Something powerful, something frightening. Nothing he could put a name to.

“I’m not sure,” he said, and there was something more he meant to say, but the words evaporated away before he could say them, and before he realized what he was doing Luke was crossing the room toward her. That was rude, a small voice inside him said. Rude to the boy. It wasn’t right to walk away in the middle of a conversation. Luke only barely heard that voice.

He was beside the woman, now. Not looking at her, not exactly, but not looking away from her either. She seemed to watch the floor as though it were a bonfire that might consume her; for just an instant she glanced up at him shyly, but before her eyes even had a chance to focus she looked away again.

“I’ve missed you,” she said. That sounded strange to Luke; it hadn’t been a full day since he’d last seen her. And her voice — he’d never heard her voice before. In all of last night she’d never spoken. Her voice was beautiful, he decided; rich and melodious and elegant; it had the slightest trace an of exotic accent.

He smiled. “It hasn’t been that long,” he said. “A little while before sunrise, maybe? I think I remember dawn creeping out around the edges of the sky.”

“A day? Only a day, really?” She was looking out the window, now, focusing on something off beyond the street lights. “So much has happened. Too much. This world . . . I don’t know it. There were times when I thought that only you were real.”